by Amy Reading
Something happened to Norfleet in his hotel room that day, something difficult to explain. Swindlers and sociologists tend to describe the big con in mechanistic terms, as if the script were a well-wrought assembly line that takes up a man, deftly works on him, and spits him out the other end as a dupe with empty pockets. In their understanding, the big con works so well because confidence is so easy to generate. Confidence is more than blind faith, but less than perfect knowledge. It is, according to the dictionary, “a mental attitude of trust”—the feeling of trust—rather than trust itself. Push the right psychological buttons and the swindler can create a hologram of trustworthiness in a mark’s mind. This, of course, contradicts everything Norfleet would have liked to believe about himself. He was fond of considering himself a man of experience, knowledge, and charm. But Furey and his gang operated with a different understanding of human nature. They knew that this very belief was one of the buttons they could push to produce confidence and flip open Norfleet’s wallet.
Yet if the average person underestimates his own gullibility, the average swindler overestimates the predictability of human nature. Perhaps we do have psychological buttons that make it easier to access our confidence than we’d like to think, but no one can control precisely what happens when those buttons are pushed. Norfleet’s fleecing shows us that the experience is more alchemical than mechanical. When Furey and his men filled Norfleet’s mind with their seductions, then sent him reeling into the realization of his suckerdom, their words mixed with everything else in his mind—his family’s proud history on the Texas plains, his cowboy notion of justice, the decades he’d spent on the prairie in solitude tending to cattle and his own soul—to form a volatile mixture. Norfleet emerged from the big con as a changed man, stone-broke but wealthy in outrage.
In his hotel room, Norfleet draped a damp towel on his perspiring forehead and lay down on the bed. He closed his eyes and thought of the five men whom he’d considered his friends. It seemed truly unbelievable to him that they were not who they said they were, and he found that he could not quite “see” them anymore, their visages suddenly as changeable as their characters. And so, like a sick man wrenching himself back to health, Norfleet mustered all his mental discipline to counteract this drift. Lying on the bed with his eyes closed, he made himself retrieve every last detail of the five men, calling them up one by one and preserving them in his mind with the fixative of his rage. Furey was first, with his “round, smooth face that radiated health and vigor; his greenish blue eyes and their magnetic pull.” Only in retrospect did Furey seem like “a serpent coiled.” Next was Spencer, who impressed him with “his splendid military carriage,” his “keenness, alertness, a wide-awakeness and up-to-dateness” that allowed him to wear his fine clothes with flair. Only a slightly crooked nose marred his polished exterior. Like Furey, though, Spencer had a tell that hinted at the subterfuge behind his mask. When he smiled, “his lips parted and their edges, like thin rose petals rolled back into his mouth leaving a noncommittal expression upon his handsome face.” Hamlin’s disguise as a mule buyer was convincing because he was even “built like a burro,” with glossy black hair and weather-beaten features. Ward, the Dallas exchange secretary, was the quintessential businessman who appeared to Norfl eet the most well-bred member of the gang. Gerber, the Fort Worth exchange secretary, was pure menace, with “two bullet eyes of black” and a sneering mouth. “If I were to be killed,” Norfleet thought, “this man would be my murderer. He was the death-dealer of the organization.”
The Furey gang in the mug shots that Norfleet used to track them down (photo credit 1.1)
Sitting up and shaking himself from his trance, Norfleet wondered what time it was. He called the reception desk, and the operator informed him that it was 10:30 a.m. That couldn’t be right, he told himself, since he’d returned to his room after 10:00 a.m. He cupped his chin in his hand, and with a start he felt bristles on his face. He rushed to the mirror, then rushed back to the phone to call the operator again and ask her what day it was. It was 10:30 in the morning on the day after Furey had stood him up. He’d spent twenty-four hours on the bed, zeroing his mind on his targets. The extraordinary energy powering his anger convinced Norfleet that he was right to line the five men up in his sights. “I knew they were mine for all time,” he wrote. “From that moment I began the chase, the world my hunting ground.”
He went to Pinkerton’s Detective Agency in Fort Worth. One of its agents accompanied him to visit the chief of police and the county sheriff. Then he took the next train to Dallas, where he called upon the captain of the police force. The officials he met at all four agencies were friendly enough but entirely noncommittal in their promises to help him. Norfleet swiftly realized that the only person with the motivation to hunt for his swindlers in whatever corner of the nation they were hiding was he, and that his search would require the very broadest net and the most creative approach possible. So he swallowed his shame and met with reporters from several newspapers, as well as the Associated Press, and told them the entire tale of his swindling, concluding with a direct appeal to readers for their help in locating the men.
Then, finally, he returned to his ranch. This was the hard part. With no small amount of trepidation, he confessed to his wife the enormity of their loss, and then he broached the subject of retribution. He knew he had shrunk in her eyes; he’d just compromised her faith in him by charging so bullishly into the stock swindle. But he also knew that his home life would never be the same until he could right the wrong. “Wife,” he declared, “I want to go after those crooks myself. I want to go get them with my own wits and gun.” Eliza Norfleet understood precisely the nature of the man she had married, and instantly she granted him her confidence. “Of course you do,” she replied. “I’ll take care of the ranch. You just go and get those good-for-nothing crooks. And remember, Frank, bring them in alive. Any fool can kill a man.”
With those words Eliza entirely altered the nature of Norfleet’s story, changing it from a Western to something new. In his worldview, Furey’s gang had “forfeited their lives to me by betraying my trust.” Their infraction was so offensive that Norfleet never questioned his right to exact cowboy justice with the muzzle of his gun, and he was renowned in the Panhandle for his quick draw and lethal accuracy. Eliza made him rethink his strategy. When he set forth from Hale Center in December 1919, he did pack a gun, but he resolved to catch the swindlers with guile rather than violence—to entrap the con men within their own code of nonviolent trickery.
Joe Furey didn’t know whom he was dealing with when he fingered J. Frank Norfleet. Eliza knew. Norfleet’s bankers knew, too, because when he stopped in Plainview, the good men at the Guaranty State Bank assured him that they were unconcerned by his temporary financial embarrassment and could wait for him to settle his debts. His promise was good credit; his morals grew out of the land just as sturdily as his crops and livestock. He was the third generation of Norfleets to ranch in Texas, and he and Eliza had claimed, fenced, and farmed the land just as the region became integrated into the national economy. In part, the story of how he grew wealthy enough to be worthy of swindling is also the story of how industrialism manufactured the perfect conditions for the big con.
In later years, Norfleet was an unapologetic storyteller, and he would always start by telling the story of his last name. In the seventeenth century, he would say, two Scottish brothers joined a ship sailing for America by the northern route. The ship was dashed to pieces on the high seas, and the only survivors were the brothers, who washed ashore in Virginia. According to family lore, the colonists took in the two men from the North Fleet and rechristened them “The Nor’fleet Boys,” their original surname swept off in the ocean. Both brothers grew into respected planters, and their dynasties would forever bear the sign of their almost unbelievable resilience.
The Norfleet families farmed in Virginia until the mid-nineteenth century. Jasper Holmes Benton Norfleet, Frank’s father, mov
ed with his family to Texas in 1854, when he was twelve, settling in Gonzales, just east of San Antonio. Jasper came of age along with the state of Texas. As a seventeen-year-old in November 1859, he volunteered as a private of the Texas Rangers and spent the next six months fighting in the bloody Texas-Indian wars. A year after he married Mary Ann Shaw, a reckless tomboy two years his junior, Jasper joined the Confederate army, where he served until he was struck by rheumatism sometime in 1864. Jasper and Mary Ann’s first child, James Franklin, was born on February 23, 1865. Jasper’s cattle ranch prospered after the war, and he built his family a fine stone house. One day when the Norfleets were away from home, a band of about three hundred Apaches destroyed the house and stole seventeen hundred head of cattle. Jasper was forced to start all over again, and as he grew older, Frank joined in the family livelihood.
Frank would often tell a revealing story about his father—a story that would also prove prophetic for his own great adventures. When Frank and his siblings were young, they learned to read at something less than a one-room schoolhouse, a modest outdoor school under a brush arbor. A Yankee teacher named Mr. Denny ran the school, and he boarded for a time with the Norfleets, amusing them all with “the peculiar quirking of his mouth” when he spoke. And then the school term came to an end. Frank would say, “I remember that he stalked off down the road with his flowered carpetbag, refusing to pay my mother the amount he owed her for board.” This Jasper could not stand. He set his shoulders, caught himself a fresh horse, and took off after the schoolteacher, catching up with him outside the general store in San Saba, where he could hear Mr. Denny’s booming voice bragging about how he had walked off the Norfleets’ ranch without paying. “Th’ bed and board was not worth a cent! Why, man, there was even no tea! Think of it! No tea! Th’ same old thing day after day. I’d never pay a copper cent for such and be domned to ye.” Jasper stepped inside. He was much smaller than Mr. Denny, but in a quiet, steady voice he asked the schoolteacher if he truly meant to steal those months of labor from Mary Ann Norfleet. Mr. Denny roared out that he did. Jasper’s eyes flashed and he reached for his holster, then checked himself and reached for a wooden stick instead. Mr. Denny also lunged for it but too late, and Jasper’s blow landed between his eyes. Mr. Denny was knocked unconscious, and when he came around, he grudgingly instructed the postmaster, who also happened to be treasurer of the school board, to pay Jasper in full. If Frank knew this story of avenged injustice so well, it was because he was the seven-year-old secretly following his father on his own horse—named Old Denny—with his pockets full of stones to throw at the schoolteacher should his father require assistance.
In 1879, when Frank was fourteen, he made his first foray into the Panhandle to join a buffalo hunt. While the Native Americans on the Texas plains had been defeated, killed, or herded into reservations by the close of the Red River War in 1875, the buffalo hung on a bit longer. Uncountable millions of American bison used to roam the plains, eating the short, curly buffalo grass. Hunters used to tell of climbing a bluff, looking down, and seeing half a million animals at one glance. The Plains Indians hunted them to eat and trade, but it wasn’t until the white men created a market for their fur that their numbers began to precipitously diminish. Once steamboats ascended the Missouri River and railroads forged across the plains, it became economically efficient to transport the hides to cities, where a robe that traded for less than $5 on the range would fetch between $15 and $40 at select furriers. When tanners learned to turn buffalo hides into strong leather for use as industrial belting in steam engines in the 1870s, the fate of the buffalo was sealed: the Industrial Revolution literally as well as metaphorically drove the buffalo to extinction. In just three years, 1872 to 1874, over three million buffalo were slaughtered, and by 1875 only about ten thousand buffalo survived in the Texas Panhandle, their very last refuge in the West. For the next few decades, settlers found the plains colored white with buffalo bones. Homesteaders making the arduous journey to town for supplies would bring no money, instead collecting the bones along the way to sell in the cities for $21 per ton, later to be crushed and converted into phosphate for fertilizer.
While Norfleet was on the buffalo hunt, a man rode up with his wife and three children and asked to join their poker game. He ran a blazer on them, which is a cowboy’s way of saying he swindled them, and the hunters did the only thing possible. They dug a hole and rolled him into it, burying him with his boots on. His grave marker was a hackberry tree from which they’d hanged another man. Norfleet said, “The woman and her babies were better off without the father.” One of the babies was near death with a bowel complaint, probably the result of alkaline water, and while the father would have let her die, the buffalo hunters treated her “with utmost respect and care.” Norfleet himself went out to kill a fat calf and fry up its tallow. He browned some flour in the fat, mixed in an alarming amount of salt and pepper, and thinned the paste in more grease. “I took the baby in my arms and began feeding it the thick gravy from the end of my finger. It went to sucking that finger like a starving cub.” He proudly reported that the baby grew up into a fine woman.
Frank never really returned home after the buffalo hunt, and he spent the next ten years as an itinerant cowhand on the plains. In 1886, when he was just twenty-one years old, the brothers Dudley H. and John W. Snyder hired him and nineteen other cowboys to drive two herds of cattle numbering in the thousands from central Texas to the free range of the Panhandle. The cattle ate their way across the plains, while the herders existed on what they could fit onto the wagon. When they arrived in the Panhandle and claimed a range, only Norfleet would agree to stay and look after the cattle, so the Snyders selected a mount of about a dozen horses and left him alone. Norfleet would always remember that date, June 22, 1886, because it was the longest day of the year—and that year it was the loneliest. But he impressed the Snyder brothers with his work, and in 1889, when the Snyders sold the Spade Ranch to Isaac L. Ellwood, Norfleet “went along with the deal almost like a chattel.” Not that he minded. Norfleet was an independent man, and though he worked for Ellwood for seventeen years and even named his firstborn son after him, he did not once lay eyes on his employer in those first fifteen years. Ellwood made him foreman, bestowed on him his confidence and some stationery with “J. F. Norfleet, Foreman” at the top, and went back home to Illinois.
Norfleet may have been in the middle of nowhere, but he was on the cutting edge of progress. Isaac Ellwood was part of a new breed of Texas rancher—the speculating kind. After the Panhandle was divided into twenty-six counties in 1876, land-speculating syndicates, formed from eastern and foreign capital, moved in to color the map. They bought up the smaller, independent ranches like the Spade, joined them with adjacent properties, and created vast holdings owned by corporations and managed from afar. Many of these corporate ranches failed, despite the state’s subsidization of the industry through open range, free water, and free grass. But the stream of capital watered a handful of inventions that themselves proved explosively profitable.
Seasonal roundups of free-range cattle worked well enough, and they were a much-needed excuse for some rather rambunctious cowboy socializing, but ranch managers figured they could make more money if they could control where the cattle roamed. It was costly to find them and separate them each spring and summer, and when winters were bad, hordes of invading cattle from the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado would move in and steal their grass. The problem that cattle ranchers faced was how to build barriers on the limitless horizon. Norfleet’s boss, Isaac Ellwood, was the co-inventor and manufacturer of barbed-wire fencing, which revolutionized the cattle industry. At first, ranchers tried bare wire fencing, but the implacable cows just slipped right through it. Next they tried twisting barbs around the smooth wire, but the cows figured out how to slide the barbs into bunches and then slither through the gaps. Finally, Ellwood and his partner, Joseph Glidden, invented a way to twist two smooth wires together to hold the ba
rbs in place. The cows were finally contained. Norfleet’s main task on the Spade, then, was to install Ellwood’s wire, and by the time he was done, he had fenced 246,000 acres of Texas plains. In the meantime, Ellwood’s company expanded and reorganized as the Superior Barbed Wire Company in 1881, which later became part of United States Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation.
It might look easy to twist some wire around itself and convert that into a paper fortune on the New York Stock Exchange. But Norfleet’s job as a Texas cattle rancher was to convert grass into meat into money, season after season. Norfleet’s letters to D. N. Arnett, Ellwood’s manager, from these early years tell of near-constant hardships. The unspoken question that his letters address is whether there is enough grass to “make feed” or sustain the herd, between droughts in the summer and thick pelts of snow in the winter. In June 1892, Norfleet wrote, “The drouth is at last broken we have just had the heaviest rain I ever saw it come up with a terrible storm and hail that did a great deal of damage.” Not only did the storm pound into mud the few shards of grass that remained from the drought, but it also destroyed two of the windmills on which the ranch relied for irrigation. Several summers later, Norfleet reported that his cattle were “eating loco,” a poisonous weed that is the first green thing to sprout on the prairie in the spring. Norfleet, though, was optimistic that one rain would produce enough grass to save the herd in time for the September roundup. He ended his letter to Arnett, who lived in Colorado City, on a characteristic note: “Am sorry to hear the Grasshoppers are causing such a loss to the good people of that country.”
These years are marked by what Norfleet did without. For one thing, he did without money entirely. In his first year at the Spade Ranch, he spent a grand total of fifty cents of his year’s wages for stamps and stationery to write to his mother. With his gun and a horse, he was replete within himself. He drank alcohol only medicinally, adding whiskey to his tallow-flour-pepper-and-salt recipe when his digestion required it. And he was equally demanding of those in his employ. As foreman of the Spade, he had many young boys under his care, impressionable boys who had hurtled themselves into cowboy life with no experience of the wider world. “I took a notion that I was not going to let the boys gamble in my camp,” Norfleet later wrote, “because I had seen serious difficulties arise over a game of cards”—if you call seeing a man buried alive for running a blazer a difficulty—“and to keep things from going that way, I refused to allow any gambling.” Instead, he would read them a sermon by the Reverend DeWitt Talmage that he’d cut out of the newspaper called “A Wayward Son Is the Heaviness of His Mother.” He says he never once got to the end of that sermon. He’d get partway through, and one of the ranch hands would suddenly stand up and announce that it was time to let the horses out. “And when they got outside the door I could see them get out their old big red bandana handkerchiefs and wipe their eyes.”